Today at lunchtime, Baby A asked for some sweet-potato fries. She's been sick, so I didn't mind heating the oven up to 450 degrees on this, the first warmish day in weeks. She deserved a small pleasure.

I took the bag out of the freezer and poured some fries onto a baking sheet. They were covered in ice crystals. "Those need to be slaked," I thought. Slaked? Where did that come from? Remember...remember...oh, yeah, from an interview ten years ago with Wendy's founder Dave Thomas.

When I was editing QSR magazine, I had the chance to interview Thomas on two occasions. The first was for the cover of the premier issue—somehow, and I'll never be sure quite how, I got one of America's best-known faces to grant an interview for a new magazine that had no sample issue, nothing but a four-page media brochure and a lot of big ideas to speak for it. I called, I wrote letters, I played up the Duke connection (I'd gone to graduate and undergraduate schools there, he'd given a ton of money to the Fuqua business school). And somehow it worked.

Thomas talked with me for more than an hour, though I'd asked for only twenty minutes. He told me what he valued most in the kitchen—like taking a moment to shake the ice crystals and moisture off of the fries before plunging them into the oil. That's what he called slaking, and he insisted that small detail made his fries better than anyone else's.

What struck me most about that interview was Thomas's completely unpretentious personality. Success had not changed him. This multi-millionaire chief executive pronounced "specifically" as "pacifically," and "spaghetti" as "p-sgetti," and it did not matter. I went on to interview many more CEOs, most of them business-school stars who had fast-tracked to leadership roles at big corporations, names you'd recognize. But Dave Thomas taught me to listen for true talents—not book smarts, but the ability to motivate all kinds of people, to be relentless about the details, to persevere and earn success, rather than have the role handed to you.

As I put the fries into the oven, I made a mental note to talk with Baby A later on about these qualities. Of course, I want her to excel in school, but I also want her to value the qualities that made Dave Thomas successful.

I also remembered that for all the criticism of quick-serve food and companies—and some of that is certainly deserved—there are also hardworking people like Dave Thomas who pursued good principles.

There's a neat Flash-based biography here if you'd like to learn more about Dave Thomas's legacy.

This post brought to you by the sweet potato...and a mom who's been stuck home with a sick kid and thinking a lot. I'm sure you've been there.

UPDATE: Dave Thomas's original Wendy's location in Columbus, Ohio, will soon be closed because of lagging sales.